My Climate Barcode encompasses forty collages and four videos (1985–2024) in which personal time and climate time intersect like two lines converging on the same horizon.

Each work consists of four constant elements: the KNMI climate barcode for that year, a photograph of the artist from that same year, and fragments and covers from the KNMI annual reports* in which the language around climate gradually shifts from observation to warning of impending change.

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By placing these personal and climate timelines side by side, a sharp tension emerges: as an individual comes of age, the climate barcodes grow relentlessly warmer. The series makes palpable that climate change is not an abstract vision of the future, but a process that unfolds within a single lifetime — visible, measurable, and no longer possible to ignore.

 

The series also reveals the complexity of climate change. A year that is on average the warmest on record can simultaneously include a winter cold enough for skating. A dry year can coincide with extreme rainfall. Climate is about averages across years and decades; the human experience of weather is about days, seasons, at most a few years. It is precisely there, in that difference of scale, that a loss of urgency can take hold.

 

Together, the collages form a poetic archive: a life unfolding within a world that is perceptibly shifting, where too little change is still taking place, with consequences that are only partially understood and felt.

 

*The KNMI annual reports for 2013 and 2014 are not available, so images from the KNMI website and the Climate Scenarios '14 have been used here.